While Hilary and Harshaw were arguing about MS and PD yesterday, this came
across the AOL ticker - and I had expected someone would have posted it
right away - but nobody did.
News Home : Latest News Stories : Science
Stem Cells May Help Muscle Disease
The Associated Press
Thursday, September 23 1999 06:27 AM EDT
BOSTON (AP) - Researchers have found that bone marrow
transplants might be a new way to restore strength to patients with
muscular dystrophy and other muscle-wasting diseases.
In very preliminary experiments, scientists at Children's Hospital
infused mice weakened with muscular dystrophy with bone marrow
stem cells taken from healthy donor mice.
The stem cells generated new bone marrow and blood cells in the
sick mice, whose own bone marrow had been destroyed with
radiation. The stem cells also generated healthy, mature muscle cells
that traveled through the blood stream to ravaged skeletal muscles
and to a certain extent, restored them.
If the immature bone marrow stem cells can generate muscle cells,
they also might prove to be a source of repair cells for other kinds of
tissues in the body, said scientists led by Richard Mulligan and Louis
Kunkel of Children's and Harvard Medical School.
The findings are important because ``in adult tissues we may have a
reservoir of stem cells that has more potential than we think'' to
differentiate into other types of cells, said Emanuela Gussoni, a
biologist in Kunkel's lab and lead author of the paper in today's issue
of the journal Nature.
In a related experiment, Gussoni and her colleagues isolated muscle
stem cells from mice and demonstrated they could generate adult
muscle cells as well as bone marrow cells.
Dr. Leon Charash, chairman of the medical advisory committee of the
Muscular Dystrophy Association, told The Boston Globe that the
findings were ``exciting'' because ``the work may eventually lead to an
unanticipated treatment approach for all the muscles ravaged by
neuromuscular disease.''
APO/Cell-Therapy/
Copyright © 1999 The Associated Press. The information contained in
the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise
distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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